The present invention relates to apparatus and technique for testing systems, and more particularly relates to a device emulator that is configured to emulate an electronic device and operate in conjunction with a computing device to test the computing device.
To provide consumers with reliable electronic products, the manufacturers of electronic products typically test the electronic products prior to sale. Tests of electronic products are performed at a variety of development stages and manufacturing stages of the electronic products. For example, functional tests and parametric tests might be performed on the individual integrated circuit chips and their associated packaging prior to sale of the chips to a manufacturer that will use the chips in an electronic product. Prior to selling the electronic product to a consumer, the manufacturer of the product also typically tests the product to ensure proper functionality of the product. Further, if an electronic product is configured to operatively interact with another electronic device, such as a computing device, the manufacturer of the electronic product might also test a number of computing devices manufactured by a number of manufacturers to determine whether their electronic product is operable with the computing devices. Similarly, a manufacturer of a computing device might test their computing device to determine whether the computing device is operable with a variety of peripheral electronic devices.
Testing the operability of a variety of electronic devices with a variety of computing devices tends to be cost prohibitive as the cost of obtaining a variety of computing devices and/or a variety of electronic devices is relatively large. Therefore, manufacturers of electronic devices have turned to emulating the varieties of computing devices with which their electronic devices are configured to interactively operate, and manufactures of computing devices have also turned to emulating the electronic devices with which their computing devices are configured to interactively operate. As new technology develops, new emulators are needed to emulate the new technology and/or the devices with which the new technology is configured to interactively operate. For example, as new technologies are developed, the manufacturers of these technologies may have desires to test not only for whether their technologies operate without error, but may also have desire to test how their technologies operate in error situations. Current testers and emulators do not provide, or provide inadequate, test capabilities for testing error cases.
Therefore, there is a need for new and easy to use apparatus and techniques for emulating various electronic devices to verify whether other devices that are configured to interactively operate with the electronic devices operate properly.